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Chuck Todd Goes Ballistic on AOC for Using ‘Concentration Camps’ – And Dems for Not Condemning Her – Even Though She’s Right

MSNBC’s Chuck Todd says “you can’t call” the concentration camps at our southern border “concentration camps.”
“Be careful,” Todd warned – comparing the Trump administration’s camps, where we are keeping migrants, including many children, against their will, in horrific conditions – “comparing them to Nazi concentration camps. Because they’re not at all comparable in the slightest.”
His tone was one of anger and personal outrage.
He is extraordinarily wrong.
Todd, who hosts NBC’s “Meet the Press” and MSNBC’s “Meet the Press Daily,” also serves as the network’s political director. Perhaps he should reach out to a few historians and a few experts on authoritarianism, maybe experts in Nazi concentration camps, before opining in such a degrading and condescending manner (watch the video below.)
Todd is actually criticizing Democratic lawmakers for not condemning Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks.
Keep in mind, she never said “Nazi concentration camps,” nor did she say “Nazi death camps.”
She said “concentration camps,” which Hitler did not invent, and which have been used before, even by the U.S. – as many who studied America’s horrific Japanese internment camps know. Some, like George Takei, say the comparison is legitimate. He should know. As a young boy he lived in two.
I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again.
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) June 19, 2019
Chuck Todd is extraordinarily wrong.
Todd opened his segment by saying he’s “obsessed with what’s happening at our southern border.”
That’s false.
If he were, he wouldn’t focus so much on what AOC and historians are calling the camps, and would do something about them.
Todd goes on to say what’s “as upsetting as” AOC’s comments are the Democrats who refuse to condemn her for them.
Why should they? She’s 100% correct.
Andrea Pitzer, who wrote “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” today writes in GQ that Trump’s camps are the “heirs” of concentration camps.
“A camp in a country in which the leader openly expresses animosity toward those interned, in which a government detains people and harms them by separating children from their parents or deliberately putting them in danger, is much closer to a concentration camp than a refugee camp.”
Others have been less generous.
I did my dissertation on #ConcentrationCamps, so I have a few thoughts about @AOC's use of the term to describe the build up of camps on the US southern border. For those in a hurry, here's the take-home message: By any reasonable definition, these are concentration camps
— Lester Andrist (@landrist) June 18, 2019
"Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed…to separate one group of people from another group." – Waitman Wade Beorn, Holocaust and genocide studies historian at the University of Virginia https://t.co/1gaFpj0pwK
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) June 18, 2019
Chick Todd is extraordinarily wrong.
Watch:
Ocasio-Cortez’s comparison of ICE detentions to concentration camps did border detainees “a tremendous disservice” #MTPDaily
“She said she didn’t use those words lightly,” Chuck Todd said. “Well, neither did I.” pic.twitter.com/5CIOfWn7BQ
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) June 19, 2019
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